Customer Reviews:
(RAW Rating: 4.5) - What is happening to black men?.......2007-08-04
Demico Boothe has explored the reasons so many black men are indeed in prison in, WHY ARE SO MANY BLACK MEN IN PRISON? He begins with his own story of a shaky upbringing and his subsequent dabbling in drug dealing. He was caught with a few grams of crack cocaine but because it was the dreaded crack, he was given 10 years in prison. When he left prison after serving his time, he was actually railroaded back into prison by a crooked justice system. He delves deeply into our justice system and the motives behind all the new prisons that are being built. He gives succinct and reasonable views of exactly what is happening now in the United States and how the past has played a role in the present. He uses persuasive statistics regarding the number of black men in prison as compared to the number of white men who are incarcerated.
Demico Boothe has done an excellent job of researching his subject and it is a plus, if unfortunate for him, that he has actually experienced first hand what he's talking about. I knew I was hearing the real story rather than just statistics from an intellectual who had no real idea of what the prison system is really like. I would have liked for Boothe to search a little deeper into the Haiti, Aristide and USA question, maybe even reading Randall Robinson's take on the situation, and then he might see it a bit differently. Otherwise, it is a good book and one every one in America should read. We indeed, have a crisis going on.
Reviewed by Alice Holman
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers
Why Are So Many Black Men In Prison? A Comprehensive Account Of How And Why The Prison Industry Has Become A Predatory Entity In.......2007-06-09
The book was very interesting. I learned soooo much about the government and the prison industry. I did some searching independantly to check on the things reported in the book and they are very true. Great Read!! Buy the book.
A Must Read.......2007-05-25
Mr. Demico's book is a must-read for anyone concerned about young African American men. Although I did not agree with every conclusion he reached, Demico's main premises are convincing. As a white woman who teaches mainly students of color, I am always impressed, and often in awe, of those young men who reach college with so much going against them. Demico's books lays bare not only the horrible inequalities of our society, but also the racist attitudes of our political system - - Democrats, Republicans, and most everyone in between.
Why are so many Black Men in Prison?.......2007-05-13
I is a well put together book. He really goes into a lot of detail of how our society is really set up.
Why are so many blacks in prison?.......2007-05-12
I found this book very interesting. As a white devil myself, I had no idea that I was responsible for forcing blacks into committing crimes and then subsequently clogging up the whole "Prison Industrial Complex"(tm). I will try to stop causing this, as I am sure it is creating a LOT of trouble for everyone! Sorry!
It is probably also my fault that young black men dressed in XXXXL clothes overtly threaten me and my family members routinely. Can anyone tell me what I should do to make this not happen?
I imagine it's also my fault that black on white violent crime is WAY higher than white on black violent crime, even though blacks constitute about 12.5% of the population, and whites are about 70%. But since it is impossible for a black to commit a hate crime according to our criminal justice system (since blacks are not under any circumstances racist), statistically, there are more white on black hate crimes. Boothe notes a statistic regarding hate crimes, but he skips the one about interracial violence in general.
In sum, Boothe notes that just about everything blacks do is actually MY fault, because my skin is white. Boothe, I've got a word for you.
Introspection.
Book Description
Most people in post-communist societies believe that corruption is widespread, and that they must play along because "the system" compels them to do so. But what system exactly? What are the structures and mechanisms of corruption in post-commmunist societies? And why is this corruption so pervasive and hard to fight? "The System Made Me Do It" is the first comprehensive study of the origin, nature, and consequences of corruption in post-communist societies. While international actors decry corruption as a major impediment to democracy building and economic development, this book suggests innovative and practical institutional strategies for containing corruption. It achieves a rare and perfect balance of disciplined analysis, practicality, and passion.
Average customer rating:
- A rare pleasure
- Highly recommended to serious readers
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Marxism and Law (Marxist Introductions)
Hugh Collins
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Law and the Rise of Capitalism
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The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique
ASIN: 0192851446 |
Book Description
In this introduction to Marxism and the law, Hugh Collins presents a unified and coherent view of Marxism, which he uses to examine the specific characteristics of legal institutions, rules, and ideals. He pays particular attention to the place of ideology in law, the distinction between base and superstructure, and the destiny of law in a Communist society. His principal theme is the Marxist critique of the ideal of the Rule of Law. He argues that the main purpose of a Marxist theory of law is to expose the belief in the Rule of Law as being a subtle and pervasive ideology which serves to obscure the structures of class domination within the State. The author frequently subjects the Marxist approach to criticism and he shows that many of the Marxist claims about law are unproven or misconceived. The book is written in straightforward non-technical language which requires no knowledge of either Marxism or law.
Customer Reviews:
A rare pleasure.......2006-08-28
That is, to have a general opponent of Marxism in a certain field deal with Marxist views and analysis in such a clear and fair manner. In this case it is Hugh Collins, Fellow of Brasenose College (not particularly known for its radical tendencies) at the time and now a specialist in contract law at the London School of Economics who analyses the possibilities for a Marxist theory of bourgeois law, and he does so with skill and subtlety.
Collins compares various possibilities for a coherent and effective Marxist theory of law, drawing on historical materialism, alienation, class instrumentalism and various other general Marxist 'tools'. This allows him to approach the subject in a manner that becomes increasingly complex and in-depth, as in forming a general theory from these building blocks he is capable of assessing the internal consistency each step of the way. In so doing he rejects the simplistic views of G.A. Cohen and Evgeny Pashukanis, as well as criticizing Lenin and Engels (the latter wrongly attributed) for relying too much on class struggle alone as the determinant factor.
Collins in the end arrives at a comprehensive view that seems to be along the lines of Engels' actual conception of the relation between the legal superstructure and the economic basis, as seen in his letter to Conrad Schmidt (Oct. 27, 1890). Since Collins is surprisingly competent at assessing the value and use of various Marxist terms and tools, he can use the theory of relative autonomy to launch some serious criticisms at the application of Marxism to law in general, which I do not find compelling enough to change my mind but which are certainly worth examining for any radical interested in legal philosophy. It is rare enough to have opponents of Marxist theory make coherent and to-the-point counterarguments, so this deserves a wider reading, to which the reprint should hopefully contribute. It is also helpful for non-specialists that the writing is clear and concise in the best English traditions, and the book is less than 150 pages of actual text.
Highly recommended to serious readers.......2000-08-22
Few books in circulation deal specifically with Marxism and law, probably because the former assigns the latter a distinctly subordinate role among society's real determinants. In Marxian thinking, law has neither autonomy in practice - being an extention of class interest - nor autonomy in theory - being hopelessly intertwined with nonlegal structures. Bourgeois theorists, on the other hand, treat law as possessing the necessary degree of autonomy that their studies require. Collins hopes to fill the current gap in scholarship created by Marxism' general neglect of legal theory, and succeeds admirably.
Current works are combined with classical ones in highly stimulating fashion that both inform the reader and deepen understanding. Anyone who believes that the `rule of law` is about ensuring that our societal game is played fairly, should read this book. Those of a more skeptical persuasion will also benefit from the skillful treatment Collins, an Oxford Don, brings to the subject. Highly recommended to serious readers.
Book Description
This study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle together with fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the Chinese working class as workers' stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.
Book Description
with a new introduction by the author
foreword by THOMAS EMERSON
"A thought-provoking interpretation of the role of the legal ideology in the bourgeoisie'sascendance to state power."
--Harvard Law Review
Originally published in 1977 and translated into Spanish, Portugese, Greek, and Chinese,
Law and the Rise of Capitalism examines the role of law and lawyers in the European bourgeoisie's conquest of power. From the scattered urban uprisings of the eleventh century to the English and French revolutions, Michael Tigar traces this history using charters, letters, statutes, and other primary sources.
Against a backdrop of seven hundred years of bourgeois struggle, Tigar weaves a Marxist theory of law and jurisprudence based upon the Western experience. Contradicting R.H. Tawney and Max Weber, he shows that the legal theory of the insurgent bourgeoisie predated the Protestant Reformation and was a major ideological ingredient of the bourgeois revolution and also helps explain today's revolutionary movements.
In a compelling new introduction, Tigar discusses the struggle for human rights in the historical context of the past two decades, drawing on his own experiences as a fighter for democratic rights in the United States, Europe and South Africa.
Customer Reviews:
Law and ideology in the time of the rise of capital.......2007-03-27
I bought this book by radical lawyer Michael Tigar, expecting it to be a typical critique of liberal interpretations of law in the past two centuries, of the kind so well summarized by Anatole France's famous statement that the majestic equality of the law forbids both the rich and the poor to sleep under bridges, beg, and steal bread. However, this turned out not to be the case. Instead, the book is an engrossing and fascinating look into the development of bourgeois law and legal ideology from the late feudal period (roughly 13th century) to the French Revolution. In this way, "Law and the Rise of Capitalism" is rather a chronological prequel to those many critiques.
Although hampered by the lack of footnotes, the historical overview, especially of the medieval period, is very thorough and well done. It is extremely informative and once again reaffirms the degree to which the popular view of the middle ages as a time of nothing but chaos and barbarism is incorrect. Heavily relying on medieval scholars of law like Beaumanoir, Michael Tigar shows how the development of merchant capital and the independence of the towns created the opportunity for law merchant to be created, which in turn could become the basis, combined with certain Roman law principles, for a modern legal system based on property and free contracts rather than custom and commons. For each period of time he demonstrates how this development continued and was framed in legal terms, at least as regards the societies of England and France (he barely mentions anything else, except Italian banking).
Tigar develops some well-argued theses on the transition from feudalism to capitalist society via merchant capital, and locates the start of this transition (initially with a false start crushed by recession and the Plague) much earlier than is usually done. He also refutes the popular idea of law after the French Revolution being utterly different from that before, instead emphasizing the way the French Revolution was the expression of a change long coming. Equally, he argues against the conception of English common law as a gradual building of the same basic pattern, showing instead how common law underwent changes towards a capitalist law system just as much as the more formal codes of France.
The concluding chapters give some leftist criticism of modern theories of law and restate Tigar's purpose in writing this book. Most of this is superficial and rather pointless. In fact, the book would probably have been stronger when formed as simply a book on the history of law, then with some radical contemporary critique tacked on. But nevertheless, this book is much worth reading.
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The Logic of Persecution: Free Expression And the McCarthy Era
Martin Redish
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
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Binding: Paperback
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Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920
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Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism
ASIN: 0804755930
Release Date: 2005-08-22 |
Book Description
This book demonstrates that neither the current liberal nor
conservative position on the McCarthy era provides the basis for an appropriate normative perspective. Adding the perspective of the theory of free expression, it becomes apparent that both sides have ignored a vitally important point. While recently declassified documents demonstrate widespread participation by American Communists in conducting or facilitating espionage, much of the negative treatment received by American Communists had little or nothing to do with such activity.
From the perspective of the First Amendment right of free speech, there exists a significant difference between speech that advocates conduct, on the one hand, and speech that itself is part of a nonspeech criminal act, such as espionage, on the other. By helping to separate protected speech from unprotected “speech-acts,” First Amendment theory can do much to distinguish between the legitimate governmental responses to American Communism and those that contravened basic notions of communicative freedom protected by the Constitution. At the same time, by focusing the First Amendment inquiry on the McCarthy era, one should be able to glean insights about the broader implications of free speech protection.
Amazon.com
The importance of some books cannot be understated: They help place ourselves in the world, ask the right questions, and maintain useful, strategic credulity in the face of brutal empiricism. Sometimes they shed light on those facts, contextualize them, interrogate them, and so hold them up as empty, mendacious, vicious. The Judge and the Historian does this. As well as a concise and persuasive meditation on the convergence and divergence of the roles of its eponymous professionals, the book offers us a path through the tortuous proceedings that led to what the author portrays as a dreadful miscarriage of justice in a modern European state.
Italy has always had a particularly active political Left and in the late '60s and early '70s an extraparliamentary faction that descended into propagandist violence. In the so-called Hot Autumn of 1969, a bomb exploded in the Agricultural Bank in Milan, killing 16 people. An anarchist railway man, Giuseppe Pinelli, was taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (immortalized in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) fell to his death from the window of the police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claimed suicide but the Left accused them of murder. In 1972 Calabresi was shot dead in front of his home. The far-left Lotta Continua claimed it was an act of proletarian justice but many think right-wing extremists were involved. After almost 16 years of silence, an ex-militant of Lotta, riven with guilt, gave himself up, claiming responsibility for the murder. Leonardo Marino then implicated the leadership of Lotta in the affair.
Carlo Ginzburg, a noted and respected historian, draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the state's case in this late-20th-century show trial. He has written a provocative and passionate book that casts a detailed look at the facts of the case, facts that when presented here cast serious doubt on the judgments reached in Italy early in 1999. Justice is inevitably contextual, and we should consider ourselves lucky to have someone as skilled as Ginzburg in deconstructing its various questionable manifestations. --Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk
Book Description
In The Judge and the Historian, Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witchcraft trials to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of Italy's case against Adriano Sofri, figurehead of the Italian Left. Through an analysis of this late-twentieth-century political show-trial, Ginzburg demonstrates the importance of intellectual rigour and passion against political opportunism and dishonesty at the end of the twentieth-century.
Customer Reviews:
An Italian Dreyfus Case?.......2000-05-28
This little book by Carlo Ginzburg is another J'accuse, Zola's powerful indictment of the "investigation" which framed Captain Dreyfus for the espionage he had not committed. The case Ginzburg exposes here is that of three Italian leftists accused of having commissioned (and committed) the murder of a notorious right-wing police investigator in 1972. As Ginzburg makes amply clear, the case at hand is extremely weak and the conviction of the three former leftists a clear miscarriage of justice. The case rests entirely on the plea bargaining representations of someone who in the 1970s had been a close comrade of the three men, and who claims to have been the getaway driver in the murder. Allegedly overcome by guilt, this man decided to tell all to the police, some twenty years after the murder and just a short while before the stature of limitations for the crime expired. Again, as Ginzburg ably shows, the testimony of the would-be driver is full of contradictions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and the court that convicted the three went to extreme lengths to discard reliable eyewitness accounts of the murder to accept the self-styled driver's version(s) of events. Unfortunately, the book is not especially reader-friendly. It requires close reading and would probably not appeal very much to someone not conversant with the intricacies of Italian politics and the Byzantine nature of the Italian legal system which can convict someone on clearly flimsy evidence. Such weknesses in the book are a shame, because the issues involved here are potentially of wide appeal. They are also of great relevance to readers interested in history, because of the issues of evidence and proof raised. Ginzburg is a famous historian who has justly earned a world reputation with pathbreaking books like THE NIGHT BATTLES (his first and, to my mind, his best) and THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS (both of which, incidentally, I strongly rtecommend). Those works are based on trial evidence from early modern Italian courts run by the Inquisition, and in the present work, Ginzburg shows the amazing similarity between the investigative procedures for establishing guilt used by the Inquisition more than three-hundred years ago and those used by the modern-day judges who convicted the three men accused of the 1972 murder. Still, THE JUDGE AND THE HISTORIAN makes no attempt to help a reader unfamiliar with the tortured history of Italian politics since the 1970s, and so will prove difficult (and worse, tedious) to all but the bravest. Yet a simple re-drafting could have made this a besteller and brought this case of injustice to world attention.
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The Politics of Lawmaking in Post-Mao China : Institutions, Processes and Democratic Prospects (Studies on Contemporary China)
Murray Scot Tanner
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0198293399 |
Book Description
China's struggle to develop it's legal system is helping to drive an `inadvertant transition' towards democratization in the future. Since Mao Zedong's death, the China Communist Party's (CCP) leaders have increasingly shifted to drafting most of their key policies as laws rather than Party edicts. The result has been a quiet but dramatic change in Chinese politics, recasting the relationship between the key lawmaking institutions: the Communist Party bureaucracy, the Cabinet (State Council), and China's legislaturethe National People's Congress (NPC). No longer a rubber stamp, NPC leaders and deputies, though still overwhelmingly members of the Communist Party, have become far more assertive and less disciplined in their dealings with other top Party and government leaders. Deputies now commonly stall, amend, block, and increasingly vote `no' on proposals approved by the Party Politburo and the Cabinet. China's NPC, like successful legislatures elsewhere, has also used its growing bureaucracy and subcommittees as institutional weapons to expand its influence over policy. The Politics of Lawmaking in China is the first book to examine all of the changing political institutions involved in lawmaking, and show how their evolution is reshaping Chinese politics. Drawing on internal documentation and interviews, it includes new information about how the CCP leadership attempts to guide the increasingly important process of lawmaking, and how this power has eroded greatly since 1978. Through detailed case studies, the book demonstrates how and why the top leadership is often forced to settle for far less than it wants in hammering out laws. Rather than encouraging the sort of anti-communist mass uprising from below that occurred in Eastern Europe in 1989, this book argues that China's changes in lawmaking are contributing to a more quiet transition from within the Communist system.
Books:
- 2006 International Building Code - Softcover Version: Softcover Version (International Building Code)
- 2006 International Building Code - Softcover Version: Softcover Version (International Building Code)
- A Financial History of Modern U.s. Corporate Scandals: From Enron to Reform
- A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting
- Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion
- America's Courts and the Criminal Justice System (with CD-ROM and InfoTrac )
- Anesthesiologist's Manual of Surgical Procedures
- Animal Law: Cases And Materials (Carolina Academic Press Law Casebook)
- AP Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law)
- AP Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law)
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